Effective communication in the Fedora Community

[Máirín Duffy]

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 22:08 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Mailing lists for example. Even if they are 1980's technology, I haven't
> found a suitable replacement yet. They work quite well, no need to ditch
> them. 

> If you say one should not criticize things without presenting an
> alternative, it's on you to present something. Instead your description
> is rather vague.

I didn't say ditch mailing lists. I said ditch 1980's mailing list
technology. Specifically (and I have made numerous proposals that have
been widely circulated to this end over the past several months) the web
interface for mailman sucks. See
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/a-rich-web-interface-for-mailing-lists/  This proposal involves revamping the web interface to mailing lists, providing an alternative web front end without affecting the rich mail client interface (or perhaps merely augmenting it with additional headers that can be ignored if not wanted.) I have actually spoken to upstream mailman developers about this proposal as well; if Fedora was to take up the goal (the GOAL, btw, is what we should be discussing right now, not specific implementations) of improving our collaboration tools, perhaps I could get more time to work on it.

Also I do not think everyone agrees that mailing lists are fine as they
are. I just read this comment on Toshio's blog today:

http://anonbadger.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/tired-of-negative-email-threads/#comment-118

Let's put the premature implementation discussion on hold and focus on
the goals, okay?

~m